One more pun and we'll put you on headline-writing duty. It's some sort of number, then? Not half! It's 1027. To put it another way, 1,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000. A thousand million million million million! A billion billion billion!

At last we can put a figure on the budget deficit. Indeed. But if we can forget Britain's descent into bankruptcy for a moment, hella- is the term that scientists want to go alongside prefixes such as kilo-, mega- and giga-.

Says who? Austin Sendek, a University of California physics sophomore.

They love their jargon, don't they? Carry on. Almost 30,000 people have signed Sendek's Facebook petition calling for hella- to take its place within the International System of Units.

Are we supposed to know what that is too? Think of the metric system with bells on. It's run by the International Committee for Weights and Measures, and recognised in most of the world, with the notable exception of the US. Sendek has been lobbying the Consultative Committee for Units, which advises the ICWM.

I wish someone had told me about careers in international bureaucracy. We need this blimmin' great number why precisely? The largest official prefix right now is yotta-, meaning 1024. However, Sendek says, "1027 is significant in many crucial calculations, including the wattage of the sun, distances between galaxies, or the number of atoms in a large sample."

But why the h-word? It's apparently Californian slang for "lots of", as in: "There are hella stars out tonight."

We call that "shedla" where I come from. Other "critically important" prefixes most of us couldn't care less about? Tera-: a thousand billion; peta-: a million billion; exa-, a billion billion; or zetta-, a thousand billion billion.

Do say: "It's the scientific breakthrough the world's been waiting for!"